How to verify a website is who they claim to be

.org are presumably for “non-profit organisation” in the past, and is more widely accepted as non-commercial in nature. However, that does not imply that all .org sites are who they claim to be. In fact, anybody can register a .org domain name for as cheap as $9.95, and call themselves “accredited”.

Lets say there are 2 fictitious sites as follows:

authority.gov (the authoritative site, or it can be .edu, etc)
anothersite.org

anothersite.org approaches you to say that they belonged to authority.gov, and would like to ask for a favour from you.

Most people will go to anothersite.org and find all the references back to authority.gov.

However, the correct way of verifying is not through the links at anothersite.org, but there must be a page at authority.gov that points to anothersite.org.

Its commonsense, but some people will take it for granted, out of convenience, that as long as “anothersite.org says that it belongs to authority.gov”, it’s real.

What some scammers do is to “overload” you with information so that you will give up checking and believe that its real. They exploit the fact that many would not like, or does not have the time to perform due diligence to verify the facts before plunging in.

And by connecting series of cheap $9.95 sites, they are able to overload you with information, to the extent so as to convince you or a potential victim that “analysis paralysis” is kicking in and “why not you just accept its real and believe in them”.

What is “analysis paralysis”? Its a saying that the more information you have may lead you to the wrong decision. However, its not how much information, but its where you get the information that matters. Research students have been told not to rely simply on information they found on the web, but to verify which are the authoritative sites. Quoting an article or comment from an unauthoritative site will not add credibility to the research.

Cheap and free stuff are the reasons for spam, and that is why its hard to stop spam mails completely. Free emails, cheap domains, free posting at social networking sites, free posting at classified ads, free blogs (wordpress, blogspot), etc. There are great stuffs from cheap and free sites, but not without the bad side-effects that can grow worse as more and more people join in the spam.